Outside the Crowd
by freddlerabbit
Summary: For the Theme Song Challenge: Seaver reflects on being part of a team, and apart from the team. Please read A/N!


**A/N: in response to Theme Song Title Challenge – Character: Seaver; Song: On the Outside Looking In. I haven't seen most of Season 6, so I'm a little unfamiliar with Seaver and this may therefore be a touch OC – apologies if so, but am willing to take corrections and make revisions!**

The BAU is a team. She knows that. The word is actually used in the description of the unit, for starters.

It's also evident from the way this particular subdivision interacts. Although her work history is limited, Beau-_Seaver_, she reminds herself, angrily, _Seaver_'s worked in enough places to know that some groups gel and others are tied together in name only. This one functions as a team – integrated, supportive in all the right ways, which includes risking anger or hurt, compensating for one another's strengths and weaknesses, fully aware of one another. (_How can it be I still struggle with my own name?_)

Becoming a true part of a group like this one will always take time. The group has to want the newcomer, and the newcomer has to want, and be able to be part of, the group. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, things don't work out. She frowned.

Rossi had been encouraging from the start – he sought her out, he encouraged her when she voiced an interest in the BAU and in his team specifically. He'd pushed her hard when they were looking for Prentiss, and despite his own feelings about the situation, was unwaveringly supportive when she led them to unpleasant conclusions. But in some ways, he was the one who made her feel the most excluded.

Rossi had come into her teenage life with a destructive force. For a long time, although she had never admitted this to him, she had felt much angrier at him than she had at her dad. It was Rossi whose actions had directly resulted in her world being permanently riven, Rossi who had challenged everything she believed about her family and her place in the world, Rossi who had led her father away in handcuffs. Logically, even her teenage self knew that it wasn't Rossi's fault that her dad was who he was – and that she would have wanted him to be uncovered and stopped. But logic and emotions didn't always speak to one another. With David Rossi, it had taken years before she could start the peace negotiations.

Now that she had been able to work through some of these issues, to resolve and accept her situation, she had come to care for and admire Rossi greatly. Even if she had behaved badly to him as a teen, he had checked in with her repeatedly – she never would have made it into the Academy without his help – and she knew that she owed as much of who she was today to him as she did to her father. She was and would always be grateful to him. And admiring of him.

But gratitude and admiration didn't bring closeness. She was part of a team now, or would be part of a team. And that team could include Morgan, Garcia, Reid, and possibly even Hotchner – but never Rossi. No matter how their mutual circumstances continued to change and evolve, he would always seem separate from her, slightly distant. He held some key part of himself back, always judging, even though his judgments tended to be favorable. They could walk side by side, but never hand in hand.

Seaver pushed back a ringlet of hair and focused back on the casefile in front of her, catching Reid's eye briefly as she did so. He offered her a small smile, and ducked his head slightly. Sometimes, she knew, Reid also felt like he was on the outside looking in. Perhaps it was his obvious youth that made him easier to be around. He sometimes said the wrong thing, too – and she had seen the older agents occasionally offering him a word of advice, as they did her. Was he, perhaps, her first point of entry?

She sighed. For all she thought she might share with Reid, he, too, was forever separate from her in many ways. His intelligence and interests were clear delineators. But he was integrated with the others in a way she wouldn't be for a long time, and might never be. History occasionally weighed them all down together and left her treading the surface in confusion. She knew that they would develop their own shared histories. And yet. It would never be the same.

Perhaps that was really what was bothering her. She didn't feel she'd belong to this team in the way the other members seemed to. She couldn't believe they would come to rely on her the way they did one another, to trust her the way they did one another. It wasn't just newness or youth. It was their knowledge that her family had been in the BAU's sights, even long ago. She didn't think they would ever trust her.

How much did that matter?

Wasn't it just an unfortunate consequence of being human – all sentenced to solitary confinement in our own heads?

She couldn't tell just now. She supposed all she could do was wait and see.


End file.
